Dave Nordstrand: Beware ‘stop’ signs

If I reserve a bit of rage for a person I never met, it’s because he was on his cellphone, ran a 4-way stop sign and nearly slammed me.

It’s the second time in the last six months or so that life in all its fractured glory flashed before my eyes. I wrote about that first near-miss. It happened at the corner of Church and West Alisal streets right next to our newspaper offices. The driver of that car full of passengers, as I recall, was chatting mindlessly on his cellphone as he sped through that red light on West Alisal Street. I was crossing on green.

“Put your soul on the launch pad,” I thought.

But then he missed me. By half a foot at the most, I’d say. Otherwise, I’d still be in traction, all wired up and getting food through a plastic bag and oxygen through a network of tubes and pumping machines and my mind fading in and out of consciousness.

The message on the dangers of cellphone use while behind the wheel, somehow, hasn’t crossed the awareness barrier for a certain few.

I’m now a 2-time survivor having escaped this week a pickup truck with a cellphone user behind the wheel. He was smiling and otherwise oblivious to the big risks in the little world around him. This time it happened at the 4-way stop at West San Luis Street and Lincoln Avenue behind the Steinbeck Library.

One good thing for any car hit at the West San Luis-Lincoln intersection. If I had, in that crazy moment, been dispatched to heaven above, I would have departed with at least two advantages.

The first is that that corner is occupied by the First Methodist Church – a church with a good heart and a white bell tower – and by a mortuary on the other corner.

So, if you encounter a speeding driver chit-chatting it up on his cell phone while running a red-and- white STOP sign at high speed, your body can be taken care of right there, and so can your immortal soul.